Long before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, forward-looking companies around the world were practicing what today we’re calling hybrid work. Workplace arrangements where employees worked some days a week at home and the other days at the office were already quite common across the corporate landscape.
Beginning in the mid-1990s in the Netherlands with the consultancy Veldhoen Company, the concept of activity-based working (ABW) was introduced to clients in Europe. Since then, ABW has slowly spread around the world, most notably in Western and Northern Europe and Australia.
What is activity-based working?
ABW is an office design strategy where all employees are “addressless” — that is, no one has a fixed office, desk, or workstation. Instead, ABW offices present different types of work areas — open tables, small drop-in offices, meeting rooms, huddle rooms, soft-seating lounge spaces, libraries, etc. — that support different types of work activities.
The core idea behind ABW is that different types of work activities are most effectively done in different types of work zones, and that people move between zones depending on what activity they’re working on at the time. Each employee has a laptop and a locker, and when at the office they retrieve their things and find a space to support what they’re working on then.
ABW is premised on the idea that everyone in the organization, beginning with the CEO, participate equally with everyone else in the organization. No one, including senior leaders, has their own office.
Giving up a large and cushy private office, often protected by layers of personal assistants, is a non-starter for many senior leaders. Relinquishing that status-marker can be a blow to some people’s egos.
But that’s precisely the type of disruption that ABW introduces. The boons, both organizational and financial, can be quite profound, and thus many firms are starting to give it a second look.
ABW: Hybrid before hybrid
ABW might possibly be the office model of the future for numerous reasons. The very reasons that it’s controversial also point to its potential as a platform for significant organizational and financial improvement.
1. Choice – ABW is premised on employee choice. From its inception in the 1990s, employees of ABW companies have been allowed to work from home when they need to and come to the office when it works for them. What people celebrate today as being novel has been common practice in ABW offices for more than 30 years.
2. Digital-first – One of the original mandates of ABW was a combination of efficiency and reduction of waste (originally paper). Thus, ABW is a digital-first way of working where employees always have the tools to work effectively (synchronously and asynchronously) from anywhere. In this respect it anticipated hybrid work.
3. Democratic and egalitarian – In ABW offices, senior leaders work in the same way that other employees do, leveling the hierarchy or perception of hierarchy in the organization. Senior staff is much more available to engage in everyday conversations, which younger staff appreciate for the subtle, everyday mentoring and learning opportunities. An architect at one ABW workplace said that what started out as a workplace design project turned into an organizational transformation experience.
4. Reduction of space (and cost savings) – From a financial perspective, ABW is attractive because office space can often be reduced by as much as 40 percent. Since many people on any given day are working from home, there isn’t a need for a workstation for each employee. Rather, there’s often one workstation for every two or three employees. Given that real estate is one of many companies’ largest costs, reducing space size can result in millions of dollars of annual savings.
5. Improved space utilization – Before the pandemic, office utilization rates often hovered at 40-50 percent — meaning that at any given time, over half of all offices sat empty. Post pandemic, many offices have utilization rates of 10-30 percent, which represents monumental waste. By significantly reducing space size, utilization rates typically go up in ABW offices, achieving a closer alignment between supply and demand.
6. Increased employee engagement – Because ABW leads with employee choice, employees have more flexibility and agency in how they work. Studies show that this leads to significantly higher levels of employee engagement. To the surprise of many, employee engagement rates went up slightly during the pandemic, reflecting that employees appreciate the ability to work according to their own rhythms. ABW workplaces have known this for more than three decades.
7. Increased employee productivity – ABW workplaces empower employees to align their work energy and activities with where and when they’re working in ways that work for them. This includes how they use the variety of spaces at the office, as well as their own setup at home. Further, because ABW has always advocated a mix of synchronous and asynchronous work and communication, employees also have the latitude to work at times that work for them, when they feel most productive.
8. Increased employee health and well-being – Finally, because they’re allowed to organize their work around their personal lives and not the other way around, employees in ABW workplaces report much higher levels of health and well-being. From exercising during the workday to moving about from zone to zone at the office, the increase in mobility and variety during work hours increases bodily movement, blood flow, and an overall sense of well-being.
ABW: Fit for the times
ABW workplaces promote many of the goals that companies have claimed they value. Key among these is the organizational leveling and democratization that Millennials and Gen-Zers clearly want and now expect. Perhaps ABW is still perceived as being “too European,” but over the next few years be on the lookout for how ABW redefines what workplaces and workplace cultures look like.
